Founded in Oxford, England in 1984, Verse is an international journal that publishes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and visual art. The print edition publishes portfolios of 20-40 pages, while the Verse site publishes book reviews and individual poems. Verse is edited by Brian Henry and Andrew Zawacki.

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

NEW! Interview with Forrest Gander

Forrest Gander

Interview

Forrest Gander is the author of numerous volumes of poetry,
including Eye Against
Eye (New Directions, 2005), Torn Awake (New Directions, 2001),Science and Steepleflower (New
Directions, 1998),Deeds of Utmost Kindness (Wesleyan, 1994), Lynchburg (Pitt Poetry Series, 1993), and Rush to the Lake (Alice
James, 1988). He is also the author of a novel, As a Friend (New Directions, 2008), and a book of essays, A Faithful Existence: Reading, Memory, &
Transcendence (Counterpoint, 2005), as well as several volumes of
translation, most recently Firefly Under
the Tongue: Selected Poems of Coral Bracho (New Directions, 2008). The
recipient of many awards, including fellowships from The National
Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim, Whiting, and Howard Foundations,
Gander serves as Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Brown
University. Andy Frazee conducted this interview over e-mail, from October 2008
through February 2009.

From your first book of poetry, Rush to the Lake, to your
most recent, Eye Against Eye, there has been a movement from what we
might call discrete lyrics to longer sequences or series. In A Faithful Existence you write that "if we approach [human
experience] with a different model, we will ask different questions." Although
in that essay you are discussing scientific methodology, if we assume that the
discrete lyric and the sequence are two different models, two different poetic methodologies for approaching
experience, what do you see as the differences in the questions asked?

Maybe it’s something like
marriage, the sequence. The wham-bam impact of the discrete poem has endless
variations of course, and I like them. But there’s something compelling about a
commitment over time to a singular development, a signal promise that the
serial or long poem draws from writer and reader. And then subtle
connections—rhythmical, thematic, syntactic, imagistic, sonic—deployed across
wider intervals. There’s both a faithfulness and an erotics in the sequence
which appeals to me. Prolongation and delay, the extended play.

Also, facing the same poem
every day—rather than starting a new one—is another kind of challenge for the
imagination, like high monogamy. You prod yourself to keep it, as Miles Davis
would say, on the one. It demands all
your resources to keep it going, to keep it transformative, surprising. The
first sequence I wrote was “Life of Johnson Upside Your Head” in Lynchburg, my second book. After
researching unreleased recordings of Delta blues musicians at the Library of
Congress, I spent a summer in Hog Jaw, Arkansas, near Lead Hill, in a cabin
miles from paved road. I paid visits to communities where many Delta musicians
had passed—Memphis, Three Forks, Robinsonville. On those rural dirt roads, you
often find yourself walking up one tire rut and talking across a low mound of
rock and weed to someone in the parallel rut. You’re always a car’s width apart
and so conscious of conversation as a kind of call and response. On foot in the
country, your perception is more telescopic than it is in other places; there
are multiple levels of borrowed scenery. You see the person you are talking to
and the scrim of trees on the other side of her and the field through the trees
and hills beyond the field. All of this is to say I’m interested in perceptual
rhythms and how they change in different situations. And I’ve felt I could best
explore the complex of those rhythms in sequences. In “Mission Thief” from Eye Against Eye, it’s the Mission
District of San Francisco. In “Carried Across” from Torn Awake, it’s Mexico City. Taking on place as event requires
some room.

You've
described your recently published first novel, As a Friend, as a
work "that may escape genre description—a melding of poetry and prose,
incantation and narrative." How did the book come about, and in what ways
may it be (or not be) an extension of your poetic work? What does this melding
of genres achieve that couldn't be achieved through any one genre?

From the late 70’s on, the lyric has been under
sustained, healthful critique. These days, the focus on line break seems to
have been eclipsed by a focus on juxtaposition. Many poets are as suspicious of
conspicuous musical prosody as of any equation between truth and beauty. While
notable poets are writing beyond conventional genre boundaries, some
influential prose writers—David Markson, Carole Maso, and John Wideman come to
mind—veer toward poetry. I’m more interested in writing, period, than in genre.
For most of my writing life as a poet, I’ve been keen on the line, on how
perceptual and emotional registrations might be sharpened by line break or by
the staging of line across page. In my books from Deeds of Utmost Kindness
to Torn Awake, I was particularly absorbed with developing emotional and
intellectual depth through polyrhythms, stacked clauses, and multiple voices. I
drew from a wide range of lexicons, from my background in geology to my
obsession with photography, from the rollercoaster experience of fatherhood to
the erotic life of adults. For all its limitations, expansive lyric prosody can
unleash a deep and complex realm of feeling, one that often seems to
characterize my actual experience of being awake in the world. But I’m
interested in other strategies and in other inquiries. I worked on that slim
novel, As a Friend, for nineteen
years. It was hundreds of pages long, I stripped it down, I built it up again,
I flailed through I don’t know how many versions. It took me nineteen years to
figure out how stop trying to write like “a novelist” for one thing, and to
figure a way for myself.

In A Faithful Existence you discuss the Mayan belief that "the
final apocalypse, the one they predicted for our time, would be brought about
by … hubbub, commotion," which I relate to the inundation of information we
receive through the media and the quasi-art of advertising. What do you
conceive as poetry's role in such an environment?

Nietzsche called himself a teacher of slow
reading. I think poetry itself is a teacher of slow reading and that in our age
of spectacle, poetry is often that anti-spectacle summoning us to insight. I’ve
always felt that in the silences within poetry, a transformative inquiry opens.

In a 2007
interview conducted in Sarajevo, you responded to the question "How is it
to be an American nowadays" in this way: "As I was assembling the
anthology [Ten Significant American Poets]…
I noted that the last
sentence in Ben Lerner's biographical note reads: 'He is currently ashamed to
be a citizen of the United States.' I think he speaks for many of us."

As I think through and write this question on the morning
of Tuesday, November 4, 2008—Election Day—I wonder what relation you see
between poetry and political life. Your poetry doesn't seem as overtly
"political" as, say, Adrienne Rich's often is—or, as another example,
Juliana Spahr's. What do you see as the political role of poetry? Is it
primarily one of being "the anti-spectacle," the source of
"transformative inquiry"? How may your political views come into play
in your writing—or, to re-phrase the question, how do you see them expressed in
your work?

Ben Lerner’s work seems to me
exemplary in this respect and others. As for my own, I think the politics are
intrinsic if not overt. “Life of Johnson Upside Your Head” is a paean to the
delta blues musicians of the 1930’s, but it’s likewise a depiction of a racist
and segregated south. I’d say its politics are implicit in the angle of
attention. In “The History of Manifest Destiny” in my book Science &
Steepleflower, I reference language and scenario from Archibald Menzie’s
Journal of Vancouver’s Voyage in 1792 to highlight the astonishing
presumptions of the Europeans who, with unremitting brutality, aimed to render
a new world of plants, animals, and human beings into commodities. In Torn
Awake’s “The Hugeness of That Which is Missing,” a dehiscent narrative of
flickering faith takes place in the radioactive desert near the Pahute Mesa
Test Site. And in another poem from that book, “Carried Across,” I braid
Spanish phrases into a meditation on “national, ethnic, linguistic affiliation”
in the construction of the word “we,” that designation that every cultural
group uses to distinguish itself from “them.” To me, all these poems are
political even as my choice to explore material through inquiry and implication
is itself a choice with political dimensions.

More recently, the first long
poem in Eye Against Eye, “Burning Towers, Standing Wall,” links
historical violence to America’s 9/11, drawing into encounter the way the past
and others, even the dead whose marks we can still read, fill out our
experience of now and self. An anonymous reviewer for Publishers Weekly,
not always noted for the depth of its analysis, read “Burning Towers, Standing
Wall” as a poem that “examines Mayan architecture in Mexico, turning the
visible stones, their ‘mutilated stelae’ and ‘rubbed out glyphs,’ into a plea
for patience in the face of violence….” I’d agree and say I consider that my
work is generally political, and that the intensive way I reference the
so-called natural world is political, and that my focus on the domestic is
political, and that my choice to translate Mexican and Latin American writers
is political. There are sundry valid approaches. Not every poet needs to pound
a gavel to convene the light.

Another sequence in Eye
Against Eye, “Late Summer Entry,” is
based on the landscapes of photographer Sally Mann, and you’ve discussed
elsewhere how you observed Mann at work, both on shoots and in the darkroom.
Considering your poetry’s attention to the natural world, how may have working,
not only from another artist’s landscapes, but also from her process of making,
have complicated the kind of attention or perceptual rhythms your work seeks to
embody?

I’m
on a plane from Arkansas as I write this. This morning, sitting under a
hammered tin and wooden cross in a Christian bakery, the only place I could
find with internet in my wife’s hometown, I read a review of As a Friend in which the reviewer quotes
the phrase “dark as a hedge.” I remember scribbling that phrase in my notebook
in Sweet Briar, Virginia, while Sally Mann was making a very long exposure of a
hedge that she suspected would transform, as it did in the last gasp of
Shenandoah Valley light, into totemic blackness. In my sequence of poems on her
photographs in Eye Against Eye, there
are lines derived from observations that her husband, Larry, made while Sally
was working, and rhythms, images, and insights elicited from our mutuality. And
in all my writing, I find fragments of those arousals to which I was privileged
by invitation to share others’ visions along with their sensitivities for
experiencing those visions. I’ve written work for books with a number of
artists including the photographers Raymond Meeks and Dan Borris and the Frisian
painter Tjibbe Hooghiemstra. And recently I’ve been working with Lucas Foglia,
a photographer documenting utopian communities across the United States. Lucas
not only photographs the people of those communities, but he lives with them
and tapes conversations with them. I wrote “Moving Around for the Light: a
Madrigal” after studying Lucas’s photographs and listening to hours of tapes he
recorded. I’ve always loved that sketch in Conversation
on a Country Path when Heidegger talks about the significance of actually,
literally, sharing a vision with someone.

It seems like this idea of
mutuality relates to what, at the Symposium on Literary Translation held at the
University of Georgia, you called translation’s “fruitful contamination.” How
does this notion of shared vision inform your translation work?

It
may be interesting to think about both those terms—mutuality and
contamination—in terms of biology and evolution. One angle in recent
evolutionary studies stresses the importance of cooperation and mutuality, not
just competition, in the development of innovations. Although I just referenced
Heidegger in response to your last question, I am completely suspicious of
Heidegger’s search for “purity” and “origin.” I remember reading KKK literature
when I lived in Arkansas and seeing how their arguments about racial purity are
couched in misconceptions about “pure bloodedness.” The fact that DNA from
former parasites, early in human history, has become integrated into our own
DNA makes clear that not only is there no such thing as racial purity, but
there is no such thing as species purity. We are mongrels one and all. In
translation, two languages infect each other in such ways that the product, as
the philosopher Ortega y Gasset once noted, might be another genre altogether. The
promise for literature is that something worthwhile might be created through
that contamination, something vital that didn’t exist before in either
language.

Along with writing about
singer-songwriter Vic Chesnutt, you’ve also written liner notes for his album Is the
Actor Happy?, as well as performed with
him. How did that friendship develop, and how may each of you have influenced
or “contaminated” the other?

A
musician friend of mine, Brady Earnhart, turned me on to Vic’s first cd, Little. I don’t remember the sequence,
but over the years, I wrote to Vic, I went to see him in concert, and once,
following Peter Gizzi to the front of the stage, I got in a fist fight with two
people who were rightly mad that we had wormed our way in front of them, and I
ended up backstage with my tongue bitten almost in half. Vic would stay at our
place when he came to Providence and I have sweet memories of listening to him
and his scuffle band practice in our so-called dining room. I was happy to
write the liner notes for Is the Actor
Happy? when the record company asked me. Like the music of John Martyn, who
just died last week, Vic’s has became a part of my life. Last time I was in
Athens, Vic was working on a soundtrack that he’s doing for a film by the
German director Sebastian Schipper. And he was head over heels about a Willa
Cather novel that, for some reason, had provoked him to write all his songs in
the “I” voice, as he called it. When he showed me the text of the lyrics of a
new song on his computer, I wasn’t surprised to see that his desktop image was
that poem by Wallace Stevens that begins “Clear water in a brilliant bowl,/
Pink and white carnations. The light…”

What are you working on
currently?

I’ve
just finished up a couple translations. One is a short book of fiction, Diary of Hepatitis, by the Argentine
writer César Aira. He’s an astonishing guy, a recluse—although he agreed to
meet me once at the tiniest bookstore in Buenos Aires—and the author of more
than 70 novels despite that he must be about my age. He gives his books to
small literary presses in Argentina because he makes a living on foreign
editions of his work. New Directions has published several of his books in
great translations by Chris Andrews. I’m not sure where I’m going to send Diary of Hepatitis. It’s more novella
than novel. And it could pass as prose poetry.

I’ve
also finished up a book by Pura López Colomé, the Mexican poet whose collection
Santo y Seña, which I translate as Watchword, won Mexico’s biggest poetry
award, The Villaurrutia Prize, in 2007. It’s a complex, powerful, sometimes
almost hermetic book written at a traumatic moment in the poet’s life. I feel
her being at stake in every poem.

I
think I’ve also brought to term a manuscript of my own poems and haibun that
includes photographs by Raymond Meeks, Lucas Foglia, and the great Mexican
photographer Graciela Iturbide. My concern, in this book, is with
internationalism, borders, dialogue, perception, and the rhythms of experiences
as they are registered in different topographies. It’s also an inquiry into the
concept of “foreign.” It’s a book that won’t fit into any genre category, which
is what I wanted. One of my models is the Hypnerotomachia
Poliphili.